Because Analysis Cubes for Excel is such a highly customizable product with several different components that must be maintained on the backend, we have divided our discussion on Analysis Cubes into two chapters. This chapter covers the numerous aspects related to installing and setting up Analysis Cubes for first time usage. Then we made some minor modifications to the Analysis Services database making the cubes more useful to our organization. In doing so, our readers have gained a measure of just how far we can expand the usefulness of this reporting tool. It does take some time to learn the various inner workings of SQL to the point that we can make customizations. But the benefits of being able to do this are tremendous. As we move forward into the future of increased data consumption and storage, designing and maintaining OLAP data mining tools will be critical in the reporting toolset.

In the next chapter, we'll reap the benefits of this groundwork. We will see how our customizations...